A scene from The Riot ClubNicola Dove
There's a flicker of déjà vu seeing Max Irons step into the role of a posh Oxford University student in The Riot Club. Irons has inherited the cheekbones and silky voice of his father, Jeremy Irons, whose breakthrough was in the early eighties Grenada television adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited.
The casting-by-heritage seems entirely intentional. The Riot Club, adapted by Laura Wade from her hit play, Posh, perpetuates the stereotype of pale, languorous Oxonians in evening dress and waterfall hair-dos, but adds a bit of Lord of the Flies tribalism to fuel our rage at these .00001 per-centers. Posh, which had a timely premiere during the 2010 British general election that brought David Cameron's Conservatives to power, is a fictionalized version of the dining-and- vandalizing fraternity called the Bullingdon Club, of which Cameron, the current Chancellor of the Exchequer and London mayor were all members.
Danish director Lone Scherfig, who probed English class and corruption in the captivating 2009 film, An Education, works a similar seam here with lower rewards. The trouble is that Wade's screenplay, despite sporadically witty dialogue and a few characters you'd like to smack, is more about caricature rather than insight.
The tone is set with a Restoration comedy opening (shagging, duelling, quipping) that offers an origin story of the group's 18th-century beginnings.
Moving forward a couple of centuries, we find the club in hard post-2008 straits, desperately trying to hook in a couple of new first-year students to keep the legacy alive. The moody Alistair (Sam Claflin) has the inside track for the exclusive membership because his brother Sebastian was a legendary hell-raiser and former club president. He resents the other favoured candidate, handsome Miles (Irons) who is wooed by gay senior Hugo (Sam Reid), renowned for his debauchery and ability to compose spontaneous limericks in Latin.
Though Miles is "posh," he has left-leaning sympathies, especially for Welsh scholarship student Lauren (Holliday Grainger), whom he meets during the bender known as "fresher" week. Lauren is the sensible sort who sees the shirtless rowing team disporting themselves at a bar and observes: "Hasn't anyone noticed how massively homoerotic this is?"
No extra credits there. The other Riot Club young blades include Dimitri (Ben Schnetzer), the deep-pocketed Greek party boy who is subject to ethnic taunts, and outgoing president, James (Freddie Fox), planning for the future ("I'm passionate about corporate finance"). Pretty-boy sociopath Harry (Douglas Booth) is shamed that his family allows tour groups through their ancestral home but revels in stories of Rioters past, told by his uncle Jeremy, an oily political bigwig: "We woke up the next day in Vienna, face down in a box of marzipan."
Unfortunately there's no Vienna or marzipan either in this group's big annual blowout, which takes place in the backroom of a rural gastro-pub, where a long drunken evening turns memorable for the wrong reasons. The forelock-tugging owner, Chris (Gordon Brown), is excited by the upscale clientele, though his educated daughter (Downton Abbey's Jessica Brown Findlay) immediately smells trouble.
While the lads spout on about debauchery raised to a "spiritual" level, the results are grubbily depressing: Boozing, puking and repeatedly insulting people poorer than they are, including a prostitute (Natalie Dormer) who was hired for the evening, but after taking a look at the sodden group, makes her exit.
With a mechanical predictability, collective disappointment leads to violence, followed by remorse. Equally predictable is the strategic rescue, provided by Harry's moralizing politician uncle, who sees no point in staining a fine young man's future over one unfortunate incident, and what purports to be satiric condemnation feels more like resignation: The British upper-crust remains too prig to fail.
Liam Lacey